


Glee Meta: Why I think Finn's cause of death should have been alcohol poisoning

by luvtheheaven



Series: Metas I've Written (Various Fandoms) [5]
Category: Glee, Judging Amy
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alcohol Poisoning, Canonical Character Death, Car Accidents, Character Death, Death, Drug Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Inspired by Real Events, Meta, Other, Overdosing, philosophical musings, why we as people care about how people died
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-05
Updated: 2014-07-05
Packaged: 2018-02-07 13:51:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1901424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luvtheheaven/pseuds/luvtheheaven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is almost the 1-year anniversary of Cory Monteith's death, and I personally am still grieving both Cory and Finn in overlapping yet separate and both very real ways (despite the fact that Finn is only a fictional character, yes, I'm well aware). As someone heavily invested in the Glee fanfiction world, and as a reader who has cried as I read fics dealing with Finn's death... I wanted to share my meta perspectives on a couple of things.</p><p>Chapter 1 mentions Judging Amy in passing but is mainly about Glee and Finn and discusses why it matters to us to know the "what happened, exactly" when we learn someone has died, and why Finn dying from alcohol poisoning makes sense in my head.</p><p>Chapter 2 discusses when Finn could have died, given what we know about the Glee universe, which is useful to know for the logistics of writing fanfiction dealing with Finn's death/funeral/etc.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Why people care about cause of death, and why that cause could have realistically been alcohol poisoning

When Cory Monteith died, people were obsessed with talking about _how_ he died (a lethal combination of heroin and alcohol, which is actually typical of how people “overdose” on heroin; it’s not actually an overdose at all, just an adverse drug interaction that unfortunately results in death - it's not too much heroin per se, but rather too much to be taken AT THE SAME TIME as drinking alcohol).

I will never understand some of the insanely ignorant and heartless comments I saw at that time regarding the fact that this was how Cory died, but for many other people, the discussion was more reasonable and understandable. How someone dies _does_ seem to matter, possibly because as human beings we want to understand all the things we need to avoid if we want to prevent our own deaths, or if we want to be able to save our loved ones’ lives from as many ill fates as possible. Because we are empathetic creatures and we hate the idea that people might die in pain – and we are often desperate for reassurance that they didn’t, if the truth is, luckily, that kind. There are lots of other reasons that we might care too. Like Kurt said in 5x03 “The Quarterback”, of _course_ it _is_ just one moment in a person’s life and we should care more about how they lived. But it doesn’t mean being curious about the details of how someone died is unreasonable. It doesn’t mean we can’t have thoughts and feelings and reactions to the specific ways people die as well. In fact, they addressed that with Finn’s father on the show (episode 3x10 “Yes/No”). Finn seemed to care about _how_ the man had died.

I have only ever seen, in the Finn’s death fics that I personally have read, references to car crashes being the way he died. (Maybe I haven't been reading enough Finn's death fics?)

I, however, always intended, starting last summer before _Glee_ season 5 had started airing, to write a Finn's death fic where Finn died because of alcohol poisoning. I actually did start writing such a fic: http://archiveofourown.org/series/126750 

A part of me found the prospect of writing such a fic so daunting and uncomfortable and awkward that I was very tempted to instead switch to a car crash in my own fic. But the other part of me, the part that won out, was determined to make this alcohol poisoning version of events work. The reason?

Well, when Cory had died, before it was made official that his character Finn’s specific cause of death would not be established on the show, I saw some people saying that the writers should kill off Finn the same way that Cory had died – a drug overdose. Some people said that Finn’s father had struggled with drug addiction so it wouldn’t be so far off that Finn would have inherited a gene for addiction, and that because Cory really died that way it’d only make sense, or that because the show had never dealt with drug abuse before, this death could be a great opportunity for them to tackle a difficult subject within the show, and it wasn’t like they hadn’t had episodes dealing with serious issues before (like the school shooting one at the end of season 4).

On the other side of the arguments were “That would be so out of the blue and make no sense for Finn’s character”, and I kind of saw the truth in both sides of the argument. I felt like it was very tricky because there was also the matter of potentially (okay, let's be serious: LIKELY) disrespecting Cory’s memory. Honestly, I am happy with how the show handled it. I think it worked well enough. Although, if I was a viewer who had not known ahead of time that Cory was dead or that Finn would die, I think the episode would have left me feeling confused and upset. Especially a viewer who didn't see the _Glee_ actors doing PSAs during the commercial breaks (and because I watched this episode via an illegal download, I didn't.) It is very odd to kill off a main and significant character without giving a very clear and specific explanation of what happened to cause their off-screen death.

I relatively recently re-watched the heartbreaking _Judging Amy_ season 4 episode “Requiem”, which dealt with a beloved recurring character dying because of the actor having died. On the show this supporting character (Jared) was supposed to be marrying a main character (Maxine), but the character's storyline had been that he was busy working in China for many episodes before their wedding was supposed to take place. Therefore, we were fairly used to not seeing him for many episodes in a row. Jared was sweet and made Maxine and me as a viewer (and I presume most viewers) smile so much when he would surprise us by appearing in a random episode. He wasn't a constant on the show, but he was a memorable character and a treat when he did appear.

When the actor who played him (Richard Crenna) died, the _Judging Amy_ writers decided the best course of action would be to kill his character of Jared off too. The actor had died on January 17, 2003 of a heart attack, likely caused by the actor's battle with pancreatic cancer, and this episode of the show aired three months later in April 2003. There is a lot I could say about this _Judging Amy_ episode, but all I _will_ say is that the writers believably conveyed the character dying overseas in China of a heart attack in a way that felt very satisfying and understandable as a viewer, even if you didn’t realize Richard Crenna was really dead. (I didn’t realize this heartbreaking fact, at first.) The character’s death was dealt with in a wonderful way, which was true to his character, but also did parallel the way the man had really died in real life.

So I had thought it could be really interesting to have Finn die in a similar way to Cory, a way that echoes the truth of how Cory died, yet is still actually realistic to Finn’s character and not "out of the blue". Finn would not be doing heroin, regardless of Cory’s life experiences.

My compromise, in my mind, was alcohol poisoning. When I was in college, I was worried on one occasion that my roommate may have had severe and potentially life-threatening alcohol poisoning, and my still-in-college brother also has dealt with this with his friends. I personally did not drink at all in college, but I am in the minority. According to an Associated Press analysis of federal records, 157 college-age people in the USA, young adults aged 18 to 23, drank themselves to death from 1999 through 2005, and the number of alcohol-poisoning deaths per year rose from 18 in 1999 to 35 in 2005. (I’m struggling to find more recent/accurate statistics.) Alcohol kills many more people in this age range if you count all of the people who get behind the wheel of a car while drunk and end up killing themselves in a crash. Many other people don’t die but still may get brain damage, many have been saved by a paramedics and doctors but otherwise would have died if not for medical interventions, etc.

Finn’s character was a designated driver who remained sober in episode 2x14 “Blame It On The Alcohol”, but he was enjoying the idea of partying hard in episode 4x19 “Sweet Dreams”. (He also seemed excited by the idea of drinking at the end of episode 2x14 when Will was talking to the whole class.) While at the end of episode 4x19 he’d realized he should focus on schoolwork more than partying, it is quite common for naïve college newbies, such as Finn, to be encouraged by peers to drink too many shots in a row. One of the most lethal practices is doing 21 shots on one’s own 21st birthday, especially if it really is one's first time drinking alcohol - and it relatively often can be a celebration of finally reaching the legal drinking age in the USA, and some people do wait till then to drink, and have no clue how much alcohol is reasonable to drink.

College freshmen in their very first semester, drinking for the first time also are more likely to drink themselves to death, because they just don’t realize that they need to pace themselves or just drink less. (I've read this in numerous articles when perusing Google for the statistics. I'm not making this stuff up because it just makes sense in my head. The research backs it up.)

And in general if a person drinks much less than 21 shots in a row, but still way too much for one person’s body to handle, and if they are surrounded by similarly naive people who just want to let that person “sleep it off”, then the person can die. More young men than young women die each year in this manner. And so… after a lot of careful consideration, I decided this was an actually quite realistic way Finn could have died. It’s obviously very different than the addiction that Cory struggled with for so much of his life, it’s not really the same, but… I hope my train of thought is clear enough. I think a car crash is a VERY different way to die than how Cory died, whereas alcohol poisoning is only a slightly different way to die. It's still dying because of an "overdose", essentially. And I think the idea of being able to have Finn die in a way that at least parallels how Cory died would be... respectful, in a way, of the truth of Cory's death and what all of his loved ones went through (and are still going through).

**Coming up in chapter 2: When did Finn die? Making sense out of what never was meant to make sense: the in-universe timeline of _Glee_.**


	2. When did Finn die on the show? (An analysis of the season 4 & 5 timeline)

FYI… when trying to figure out _when_ Finn died for the sake of writing my fanfic series… I considered trying to stay completely true to the timeline of the show, but… of course it’s _Glee_ , so the timeline they used doesn’t actually make any sense.

On the show, Sectionals was... on Thanksgiving Day and that is consistently the approximate time when Sectionals always seems to be – sometime immediately before the Christmas episodes in all of seasons 1-4. Regionals in seasons 2 and 3 happened in episodes 16 and 14 out of 22 around the month of February or March, so we could presume in season 4 it was supposed to be sometime around then too.

But in that case, are we to assume Finn DID NOT start attending the University of Lima in January at the start of a typical college semester? Could 4x10 (the Christmas episode) be December and 4x19-ish when Finn was shown to be starting college be only in January? I don’t think so, because 4x14 “I Do” was supposed to be on Valentine’s Day. To me, that makes no sense. How could Finn be starting to attend college around the end of February (at the absolute earliest)? That is not how colleges here in the USA work. You have to start at the start of a semester. :P Am I wrong about this fact?

Still, giving them as much benefit of a doubt as possible… we could say this University of Lima's winter semester doesn't start till the end of February and all of 4x13 through 4x22 took place roughly within just that one month, maybe into the beginning of March. 5x01 through 5x13 was only 2-3 months, March, April and May? That part of the calculations maybe is possible. It’s the most reasonable explanation of their timeline that I could come up with… lol… and idk why I’m trying to pay so much attention to the silliness that is _Glee_ timeline/dates/month continuity. (And this basically ignores how 5x08 "Previously Unaired Christmas" was supposed to fit into the season 4 timeline because hey, it doesn't matter, right?)

 

Basically, what we _do_ know is that Finn was born in 1994 and died in 2013. This is shown on multiple plaques and whatnot in the season 5 episodes that deal with Finn being dead. The year 2013 is when Cory actually died, in July, but according to the show, it was definitely pre-July 2013 for them (see the “Graduating Class of 2013” banner hung in episode 5x13 “New Directions”). Episodes 5x11 “City of Angels” through 5x13 “New Directions” were all supposed to take place around May 2013, despite the episodes airing in March 2014.

So I have decided that Finn, the character, must have died sometime in roughly the first few months of 2013. We never learned when Finn’s birthday was, so I decided to make him die on his 19th birthday, and in my fic… this is at the end of March 2013. This corresponds to the statistic I found in my research of people "Celebrating their birthdays" with too many shots and drinking themselves to death. It also corresponds to when Kurt said in 5x03 "Honestly, what can you say about a 19-year-old who dies?", which was when _Glee_ established Finn's age as 19, not 18. The plaques say he was born in 1994 and died in 2013 but he could have been born later in the year 1994 and still been only 18 in early 2013 when he died - but according to the show, no. He was 19.

Episode 4x14 "I Do" with what was supposed to be Will & Emma’s wedding was Valentine’s Day 2013. Episode 4x22 was um… obviously I don't actually know, but by around 5x02 it’s the end of March and Finn dies. 4x22 with Regionals and Wemma’s actual wedding is probably the end of February, I guess. 5x03 picks up three weeks after Finn’s death on the show, in the middle of April, and then the show through episode 5x13 is just till the end of May. It’s all a rough estimate, but it’s what the timeline is gonna be in my head throughout this whole fic that I'm writing. If it help you with your own fic-writing, that's great. If it confuses you further or makes you laugh at _Glee_... yeah. I understand that sentiment.

 

Obviously, part of the problem is that Finn's storyline was always SEPARATE from the Glee kids' school year. Planning to have Regionals be the season 4 finale and Nationals be significantly into season 5 was supposed to be a way for Blaine, Sam, Tina, and Artie (and even Becky) to remain on the show as high-schoolers for a whole TWO years worth of TV show time despite them only having one year left of being in high school if anyone was paying any attention at all. But you weren't supposed to notice that Finn was starting college in the middle of a semester, sometime after Valentine's Day but before the traditionally March-ish time of Regionals. And Finn (and of course, more importantly, Cory) was not supposed to die. That was never the plan. But really. I just think the Glee timeline makes no sense at all.


End file.
